Project management is the process of planning, organizing, staffing, directing and controlling the development of a product, the production of a system or any other goal-oriented endeavor. By employing principals of project management, businesses can make project handling more efficient and increase transparency so that a business can more easily gauge the status of projects and have attention drawn to potential trouble areas that can threaten the timely success of the endeavor.
Charts have traditionally played and continue to play an important role in project management. One example of a chart used in project management is a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is often a horizontal bar chart developed as a production tool in 1917 by Henry L. Gantt. Gantt charts are often used in project management to provide a graphical illustration of a schedule that helps to plan, coordinate and track specific components and milestones of a project.
In recent years, businesses have begun to use computer systems to aid in project management. Computers have the ability simplify the creation and editing of charts such as Gantt charts and tie the creation of such charts to pertinent information stored by a business.
To enhance the effectiveness of computer systems performing business applications such as project management, users should be able to easily access computer resources. The emergence of the internet represents a new way for users to access remote computer resources. Through the use of web pages, a computer hosting computer resources can make these resources available to users across various platforms and throughout the world.
Web. pages are created and published by web page designers for subsequent viewing by users wishing to access the published web pages using their web browsers. Under this approach, users could browse, or surf, through sequences of prepared web pages until the user located the data the user was searching for. Under this approach, data could be displayed using illustrative graphics, such as jpegs. However, these graphics have been already generated and published to the web-server before the user could view them using the web browser.
Today, there is a need for more interactive web sites. For example, businesses may wish to make computer services such as project management applications available to a broad class of users as a web-based application (web applications). Not surprisingly, web applications have been growing in popularity. Web applications are much more than prepared web sites, web applications allow users to interact with and exploit the functionality of computer resources remotely over computer networks such as the Internet. For example, applications that were traditionally installed and executed from a local computer, for example project management systems are commonly being installed and executed on remote servers. Users then interact with the remote applications through the web browser.
By transforming applications, such as project management systems, to web applications, users should be able to view the text and graphics generated by the applications, such as, for example, Gantt charts, as they are created. This is a departure from conventional web sites that consisted mainly of pre-prepared web sites. Web applications should be able to generate and publish new web pages “on the fly” to meet the demands of modern interactive web pages and web-based applications.